Posts tagged: Aldous Huxley

On the theme of space and Mexico City on this blog my attention has thus far spanned the novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II to include The Shadow of the Shadow [1986], Just Passing Through [1986] and Returning as Shadows [2001]. Also, my coverage has included a vain search for references to the Monument to the Revolution in the works of Carlos Fuentes, from his famous novel Where the Air is Clear [1958] to the more recent novella Vlad [2004]. From these cronistas of modern Mexico, or key pensadores (intellectuals-at-large) that provide a vision of culture on a national scale, my attention then turned to the works of what I have termed the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico; thus far including Sybille Bedford and Aldous Huxley with more to come. Running with this theme of space and the city, I now relay some key insights from the novel Modelo antiguo [1992] by Luis Eduardo Reyes, published in English with Cinco Punto Press. In this novel, the insights on space and place facilitate a broader reconnaissance of Mexico City. Linking this novel with the insights of Salvador Novo in Nueva grandeza mexicana [1947], the ‘Chronicler of Mexico City’, as well as additional viewpoints from ‘foreign flâneurs’ such as Charles Macomb Flandrau and Rebecca West, provides further insight into the spatial making of Mexico City in the twentieth-century.

In picking up on my earlier post on the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico and the discussion of Sybille Bedford, my attention now turns to Aldous Huxley. Recent controversy has been rightly raised due to the bulldozing of a 2,300 year-old Mayan pyramid in Belize at the Nohul complex, close to the border with Mexico (pictured). As reported in the Guardian, Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Professor in Archaeology at Boston University, has stated that ‘I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived’, including Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. It is a landscape that Huxley surveyed himself in Beyond the Mexique Bay [1934], chillingly commenting on the choice betweens pyramids or progress, the latter defined in the modern form of personal liberty. He even surmised that ‘there are enough bricks in the Cholula pyramid [Mexico] to cover an area twice as large as the Place de la Concorde to a depth to twice the height of the Louvre’. To paraphrase Paco Ignacio Taibo II, it seems that Aldous Huxley should have avoided writing on Mexico and carried on with those dystopian novels he wrote so well.